COVER S TOR Y
At Steward, real-world, hands-on learning is a strategic priority, as is attending to the whole person when it comes to each of our students.
That’s why the nationally recognized and valued concept of experiential learning is a natural fit at our school.
“At its core,” said Dan Miller, Chief Learning Officer at the Association for Experiential Education (AEE), “experiential learning is about
providing students with an experience along with the guidance and reflection to apply the learning that comes from that experience to other
aspects of their education, and their life as a whole.”
CONCRETE EXPERIENCE
Doing / having an experience.
ACTIVE EXPERIMENTATION REFLECTIVE EXPERIENCE
Planning / trying out what
you have learned. Reviewing / reflecting on
the experience.
ABSTRACT
CONCEPTUALIZATION
Concluding / learning from
the experience.
AEE, and many organizations like it, credit David Kolb and his Experiential
Learning Cycle (originally conceived in 1984) for kick-starting the
conversation about the benefits of hands-on learning and defining a
process that produces the best results for students. The cycle includes the
experience itself, followed by reflection, a brainstorming period about
ways in which to use the new knowledge, and finally, experimentation and
application of the learned concept to other experiences.
Mr. Miller and his colleagues point to research in neuroscience as hard
evidence that this method of education not only works, but is effective
long-term. “When your brain makes connections based on actual
experiences that you’ve had,” Mr. Miller said, “those connections are
going to be much stronger than those that are made based on words
you hear or read in a book. Experiential education provides powerful
moments, and powerful moments lead to long-term retention.”
We have always valued creativity, empathy, and real-world application
on the part of our students, faculty, and curriculum. In a world changing
faster than ever, this requires constant reimagining and resourcefulness
on the part of our faculty and staff. They are not only up to the challenge,
but enthusiastically diving into hands-on learning opportunities in their
classrooms, in the community, and in their lives outside of Steward.
HANDS-ON CAMPUS
If you had walked by Steward’s new eighth-grade science teacher Mike Mailey’s classroom in September, you would have seen a hand-
drawn sign that declared the room quarantined and instructing all his students to meet out on Waddell Terrace. The students were in the
middle of their engineering unit and had just finished up a project during which they experimented with Stomp Rockets. Mr. Mailey used this
“nuclear fallout” as a clever segue into their next project by making them refugees from their own classroom.
Steward’s school-wide read for the 2018-19 school year is Refugee by Alan Gratz, which follows three young refugees from different
countries and time periods in history as they fight for survival. Teachers across all three divisions are implementing lesson plans around
the book and its message, and for Mr. Mailey’s take on it, he chose to take his students outside the classroom by “fleeing” to the Bryan
Innovation Lab for a study of the concepts of the book while incorporating engineering.
After they spent the first day learning what it might be like to be a refugee along with what physical obstacles they might face, the students
were tasked with building boats out of materials that Mr. Mailey put together with Shane Diller, Lead Technologist in the Bryan Innovation
Lab. The project ended up going in directions that not even Mr. Mailey had anticipated when Mr. Diller offered up the BIL’s 3D printer so that
students could print propellers for their boats, should they choose to go the mechanical route instead of building sailboats.
The Colonnade |
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